Creating Websites with ASP .NET

The complexity of web sites has rapidly gone up from the past couple of years. Started as static web pages a decade ago, web pages today are data driven and data intensive monsters that require a lot of flexibility and processing power. If the same old methods have been used for writing today’s complex web application codes, it will take a few months to complete the simplest data intensive web application.

Just take one of the popular social networking sites such as MySpace as an example. The MySpace profiles usually contain static data, custom written application, and streaming media. How about writing HTML codes for developing MySpace application? First of all, HTML can’t deliver what you see in MySpace. That’s why the developers of MySpace have used ASP .NET 2.0 for development.

In this brief article, we do not look at introducing ASP .NET to you; rather we look at the main steps in developing a web site using ASP .NET.

With release of Visual Studio 2005 SP1, Microsoft, the creators of ASP .NET, offers two basic project types for ASP .NET developers; web sites and web applications. When it comes to web site projects, they lack Visual Studio project properties such as solutions and project files. The result of web site project is a bunch of web pages that reside in a directory. When it comes to deployment, it is just a matter of copying the files to the web server and everything will be compiled on demand. If you wish to precompiled and deploy the binary files in the web server, then aspnet_compiler.exe can be used for the purpose. Due to the nature of the project output, this type can be considered as the typical legacy of ASP model project.

Web application project type demonstrates real Visual Studio project properties such as solution (.sln) and project (.vbproj) files. Although this type of project was not available in the earlier versions of Visual Studio, Microsoft included it in 2005 SP1 as it was demanded from ASP developer community.

The web application project type is the easiest type to deploy in a web server. The developer can compile a single assembly file and place it in /bin directory of the web server for execution. In addition to that, this type of project helps developers to deploy incremental solutions. In case if you convert a web application from Visual Studio 2003, this is the project type you must select.

There are three options that a developer can choose when selecting location; file system, http, and ftp.

Creating a ‘file system’ website is the easiest way of creating a website as the website can run anywhere in the computer. When HTTP is selected as the location, Visual Studio automatically creates a virtual directory in IIS (Internet Information Server). The automatic process eases your effort as you do not manually create and deploy the application in the IIS. When FTP is selected, you actually store and code your web application in a remote server. If this option is selected, the developer will have to provide the correct FTP account details to the remote web server for proper results.